January 2011
4 posts
7 tags
American/Canadian Dialect Tour
At the beginning of May 2011, I’m pulling out of Houston in my ‘87 VW camper (Van Coover) and setting off on a dialect-gathering tour of the US and Canada, hitting as many of the accents I don’t “have” yet as possible. Can you help? Here are my major accent goals and destinations:
In May: Beaufort SC for Gullah accents Pittsburgh - yins are welcome to hook me up...
3 tags
The (Boston) Friends of Eddie Coyle
I’m working on the Boston accent right now for AccentHelp, so I’ve been listening to a lot of clips - both my own and online - and last night I had the pleasure of getting to see Robert Mitchum’s film The Friends of Eddie Coyle. (It’s apparently a Mitchum week for me, catching Night of the Hunter just a few days ago.)
This is an outstanding work, darkly displaying the...
Received Pronunciation Syll-bles
Even with a dialect as defined as Received Pronunciation, there is an amazing amount of variation that fits within that category. At last night’s first read through for Shaw’s Candida with the Classical Theatre Company, we ended up discussing possible ways to make further distinctions between classes clearer - It’s not like we can just read Shaw’s endless character...
6 tags
To Be or Not to Be German
This evening we watched the 1942 version of Jack Benny and Carole Lombard’s film To Be or Not to Be, which actually turned out to be Lombard’s last time on screen before her tragic plane crash. The film was finished in 1941, but its release was delayed because it was too far ahead of it’s time: The US had yet to enter the war, and this film focused on Germany’s invasion of...